as they, and local judges, were su ciently hygienic in the records
they maintained.
The old southern window dressing of legal rights for African
Americans won the day again. There was no evidence of the decline
anticipated by Reese and Jones in the number of African Americans
being held by private individuals as a result of ostensible court
nes. If anything, the number of black men "confessing judgment"
swel ed, now plainly and unabashedly acknowledged in open court.
Moreover, undaunted by Judge Jones's ruling against the state's
laws forbidding black men from leaving the employment of one
white man without permission to work for another, the Alabama
legislature passed a new but essential y identical "false pretenses"
statute. Once held under a labor contract, black men who at empted
to leave their employers faced criminal prosecution for doing so. If
they had entered into the contract to avoid an earlier prosecution,
the departure would exponential y increase the time they could be
held as slaves.
In Shelby County, the number of African Americans "confessing
judgment" in open court bal ooned.8 Between November 1890 and
August 1906, the dank county jail admit ed 1,327 prisoners, facing
a total of more than 1,500 charges. Physical descriptions were
recorded only intermit ently, but during the periods when notations
of race were made, more than 90 percent of those arrested were
black. A few were women.
black. A few were women.
A fortunate group of 326 prisoners—general y whites and black
men with some modicum of means—were able to scrape together
enough cash to post a bond and obtain freedom until a later trial
date. Most then simply forfeited their bonds and remained free.
Among the 1,001 prisoners left behind, acquit als were
infrequent. Fewer than 250 defendants won their freedom, by virtue
of a not guilty verdict or some other discharge during the sixteen
years. Al but a handful of the other 750 were ordered to pay
nominal nes coupled with huge fees. A total of 124 of those new
convicts, fewer than 17 percent, were able to pay their judgments.
Ben Holt, convicted of vagrancy on August 29, 1906, was ordered
to pay the county a ne of $1. The costs of his arrest and
prosecution, however, totaled $76.28. Instead of paying, he
confessed judgment with a white farmer named James Wharton,
who paid the ne and fees and in return owned Holt for a
minimum of two hundred days.9
Of the remaining six hundred men, convicted of pet y crimes and
unable to pay what the courts demanded of them, almost ve
hundred were bartered into forced labor. More than two dozen
convicts were leased to other industrial concerns, eight each to the
Sloss mines and Alabama Manufacturing Co. Eight more were
acquired by two sawmil companies, Walter Brothers, in Sprague,
Alabama, and Henderson-Boyd Lumber Co., in Richburg,
Alabama.10
Among the leadership circles of a place such as Shelby County,
the casual acquisition of blacks through the now careful y
choreographed ritual at the courthouse became a routine perk of
modest influence.
Arrested for petit larceny in May of 1905, Jim Goodson was ned
$25. To avoid being sent to the mines with other county convicts,
he agreed to sign a contract for labor with Robert E. Bowden to
work 236 days "in his rock quarry" Bowden bridged two groups
common in southern towns—as both an important local
entrepreneur and a savvy political intimate of the most powerful
entrepreneur and a savvy political intimate of the most powerful
town leaders. His thriving quarry, Keystone Lime Co., was a busy
competitor to the Turner lime quarry not far away in Calcis. Bow-
den's much larger enterprise produced 1,500 barrels of quicklime a
day, in fteen kilns. Deriving lime from the massive formations of
limestone undergirding al of Shelby County before the advent of
the steam shovel required armies of men engaged in the crudest
form of manual labor. Hardly any person would choose such work
freely. Convicts were ideal.
For a quarter of a century, Bowden bene ted handsomely from
the availability of strong black men at the Shelby County jail.
Between 1905 and 1913, he took possession of at least eighteen
people arrested in the county, after each confessed judgment in
open court—just as required by Judge Jones's order.
Nearly al of the essential local enterprises in Shelby County
enjoyed at least periodic use of entrapped African Americans.
Shelby Iron Works, the area's largest employer and biggest
commercial taxpayer, continued to acquire black men by confessing
judgment for their sentences before Judge Longshore—continuing a
nearly uninterrupted use of slaves and other forced black labor
from the early 1860s to the end of the rst decade of the twentieth
century.
Even Sherif Fulton periodical y acquired blacks through the court
for his personal use. Fulton paid nes and costs totaling $58 on a
man named John Mack in October 1907, and in return took control
of him for six months. One of his favored deputies, W. J. Finney
arrested—and then purchased—four di erent black men between
1905 and 1913.11
Later that year, Peter Minor, faced with a $126 ne for carrying a
concealed weapon, agreed to become a sharecropper for W. W.
Wal ace, the popular mayor of Columbiana and secretary of the
Democratic County Commit ee. Minor agreed to give up half of
anything he produced on land provided by the mayor.12
But the largest portion of the men arrested in Shelby County,
nearly 250, were sold immediately, for periods of up to a year, to
nearly 250, were sold immediately, for periods of up to a year, to
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. About one hundred others
were sentenced to "hard labor for the county" and then almost
certainly transferred to the same place.
Alabama's slave system had evolved into a forced labor agricultural
and industrial enterprise unparal eled in the long history of slaves
in the United States. During 1906, the state sold nearly two
thousand black men to twenty di erent buyers. Nearly half were
bought by the two biggest mining companies, Tennessee Coal &
Iron and Sloss-She eld. The McCurdy brothers of Lowndes County
bought dozens. Hundreds more went to timber camps and sawmil
companies.
In addition to the prisoners auctioned o by the state, nearly
seventy individual local governments, like Shelby County, parceled
thousands more laborers to a hundred or more other buyers.13
These prisoners lived in such misery that even some political
gures in Alabama acknowledged the shamefulness of the system.
In a 1904 report to acting governor Russel Cunningham, the state's
top prison o cial, J. M. Carmichael, reported that Sloss-She eld
had been "required to move its prison" at the Flat Top mine to a
new location "because of the death rate at the prison formerly
occupied by them." Car
michael added that he found: "Hundreds and
hundreds of persons are taken before the inferior courts of the
country, tried and sentenced to hard labor for the county, who
would never be arrested except for the mat er of fees involved. This
is a condition inexcusable, not to say shameful."14
"The County Convict System is worse than ever," wrote Shirley
Bragg, president of the Board of Inspectors of Convicts, in 1906.
"The demand for labor and fees has become so great that most of
them now go to the mines where many of them are un t for such
labor, consequently it is not long before they pass from this earth…
If the state wishes to kil its convicts it should do it directly and not
indirectly"15
Bragg was no softhearted interloper in southern a airs. He was a
Bragg was no softhearted interloper in southern a airs. He was a
son of a great and once slaveholding Lowndes County plantation
family—one whose property had been destroyed, according to
family lore, because of their connection to a famous Confederate
general during the same raid by Union general Wilson that also
freed the Cot ingham slaves in 1865.
Yet Bragg, a child during the Civil War, was nauseated by the
degradation he witnessed in oversight of the state penal system. "I
am more convinced that the ideas of humanity and civilization
would be bet er carried out if the torch were applied to every jail
in Alabama. It would be more humane and far bet er to stake the
prisoner out with a ring around his neck like a wild animal than to
con ne him in places that we cal jails, that are reeking with lth
and disease and alive with vermin of al kinds," Bragg continued.
He cal ed the prison mines, where at last sixty-four miners had died
of disease, accidents, or unrecorded causes in the previous two
years, "nurseries of death."16
Sloss-She eld, the successor to John Milner's horrifying Coalburg
and Newcastle mines of the 1880s, had long excel ed at the
exploitation of this county convict system. The old Coalburg mine—
scene of more than twenty years of continuous slave labor—was
nearly exhausted. To exploit the remaining coal in the area, new
managers at Sloss-She eld were building a new two-thousand-foot-
deep mine nearby, named for Flat Top Mountain, and an adjoining
complex of two hundred coke ovens. Work was hastened after a
new round of criticism when thirty-two prisoners died at Coalburg
of pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other sickness in just the rst three
months of the year.17 In September 1902, the company relocated its
nearly two hundred state prisoners and nearly a thousand more
men purchased from county governments to the vast new Flat Top
mine.
But the Prat Mines complex, so long in production and now so
large and intricate that not even the owners could keep up with the
locations of al its shafts and underground tangents, outrivaled al
other buyers of black men. Spurred by technological advances,
other buyers of black men. Spurred by technological advances,
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. nal y conquered inherent
chemical aws that limited the use of iron ore from its mines and
mastered production of steel at a commercial y viable cost—the first
success at rol ing steel in the South. "This great corporation has
probably done more toward the industrial development of the
South than any other agency," enthused the Birmingham Age-
Herald.18
By the mid-1890s, more than six thousand men toiled in the Prat
Mines, performing dozens of tasks—digging coal, engineering trains,
building ovens, loading and unloading cars, washing coal, charging
ovens, operating furnaces—the free workers each earning from $1
to $3 per day19About a quarter of the workers were seized through
the judicial system, including 504 at Prison No. 2 in June 1900 and
another 400 at Prison No. 1.
The number of free laborers surged past ten thousand, as the
company's thirty coal mines—including the fourteen on the
outskirts of Birmingham—generated nineteen thousand tons a day
in 1900. To provide the most critical raw materials in iron and steel
production, TCI—as Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad was
commonly known—operated 3,722 coke ovens and four quarries
producing one hundred railroad cars of limestone and dolomite
every day. Twenty blast furnaces smelted 3,550 tons of pig iron
each day. More than two dozen furnaces generated 830,000 tons of
iron and steel, shipped to thirty- ve states and eight foreign
countries. TCI owned in excess of 400,000 acres of mineral lands.20
W. F. Tyler, purchasing agent for TCI's prison mines and fourteen
company stores, stocked food, clothing, furniture, and tools to
supply ten thousand miners and their families—including
provisions for more than one thousand prisoners. "Quote us your
lowest price on say 3,000 yards 10 oz wool convict stripes," he
wrote to a fabric maker in Columbus, Georgia, in 1899.21 The
company issued pay in its own coinage and paper scrip,
emblazoned with the Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. name
and the promise "Good At Al Stores"—the company's stores. By
and the promise "Good At Al Stores"—the company's stores. By
1900, the enterprises col ected $2 mil ion a year in revenue.
Responding to booming demand, TCI invested heavily in its Prat
Mines complex and dozens of other sites across the seemingly
boundless coal elds surrounding Birmingham. It spent $7.4 mil ion
to open new shafts, re t old mines, and streamline equipment to
extract coal from ever deeper in the earth and speed the tasks of
sorting, cleaning, and shipping coal to market. The company's
operations teemed with more than twelve thousand miners, guards,
construction, and the endless clang, steam, and whistles of
locomotives and coal cars.
A thriving, permanent town cal ed Prat City sprang up nearby,
with a bustling commercial district, bars, brothels, streetcars,
churches, and an overwhelmingly black population. Six miles to the
west, another town, Ensley grew around the company's
mushrooming pig iron plant and six open-hearth blast furnaces,
each topped with a looming red smokestack perpetual y bil owing
with cinders and toxins. The plants created thousands of the types
of skil ed jobs that only whites could seek to obtain, and soon more
than ten thousand residents crowded into Ensley's houses and
hastily erected tenements. TCI's production of train rails and other
steel surged to more than four hundred thousand tons annual y in
the first years of the century.
Scat ered everywhere were bulging stacks of rough-cut timber and
posts used to shore up the wal s and ceilings of mine shafts. Smoke,
belching from coke ovens, train engines, and houses, never cleared.
The skies were cast with a constant gray haze. In dry weather, a
thick black residue of coal coated every at surface, windowpane,
branch, and leaf—insinuating itself under doors and into cupboards
of TCI mining camps, ines
capable for an army of men and their
families. More than a dozen separate major mines near Prat City
soon produced nearly three mil ion tons of coal a year.
Where each shaft disappeared underground, enormous hoist
houses contained the elaborate mechanisms—as big as train engines
—used to lower coal cars containing miners into the shaft at the
beginning of each day and to withdraw them sixteen or eighteen
beginning of each day and to withdraw them sixteen or eighteen
hours later l ed with coal. Past the hoist house sat the coal washer
—where each day's bituminous produce was washed and any slate
or stone accidental y added to the mix removed. Then rose the
tipples—massive timbered structures in the design of the huge
railroad bridges spanning the great gorges in the West. Trams
loaded with cleaned coal were pul ed to the end of the tipple and
the contents dumped into much larger railroad cars waiting on a
track below. From there the coal was rol ed to Tennessee Coal, Iron
& Railroad's thousands of stone ovens— to be baked into coke.
Dozens of the beehive-shaped coke ovens sat a few hundred feet
east of the prison built at the mine cal ed Slope No. 12. Further on,
fanning out from the base of the hil was a rowdy community
surrounding Slope No. 12 and nine other coal shafts operated by
free men. Thousands of miners and their family members were
packed into shacks, tenements, and company houses nearby. A
private rail line passed through the nearly denuded landscape,
connecting the mines, tipples, and furnaces owned by the company.
One spur of track reached a mile-long row of another two hundred
ovens, visibly pulsating the darkness with their heat. Beyond them,
stretched along a fouled stream cal ed Black Creek, was "Smokey
Row," an encampment of rough-sawn company houses occupied by
free African American miners, many of whom had survived their
time in the prison shaft and then stayed on in the town to dig coal
for pay.
Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Co. had always been reluctant
for politicians, the public, or the region's embryonic unions to
realize how lucrative its army of forced laborers had proven to be.
Company o cials publicly complained about the shiftless and
uninspired work of prison laborers and black workers in general.
They accused sheri s of palming o sick and dying men to the
Slavery by Another Name Page 43